Energy Objectives for the United States Department of Defense

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Abstract

The United States Department of Defense (DoD) has identified energy as a key vulnerability and has made substantial moves to improve its energy profile in the last decade, including establishing a new Assistant Secretary of Defense position for Operational Energy Plans and Programs and integrating energy considerations into its large and complex acquisition process. As part of this process, each military service and the DoD as a whole have issued documents outlining strategic goals and objectives relative to energy. In addition, the Congress and both the Bush and Obama administrations have issued relevant strategic guidance. The strategic guidance conveys the importance and urgency of changing DoD’s energy profile. The documents specify a wide range of objectives, which only partially overlap. Moreover, although some terms (e.g., energy security) occur frequently, they are defined in many distinct ways. This points to a need for specific efforts to operationalize the strategic guidance so that DoD decision makers at all levels can implement it effectively.
In this report, we analyze strategy and policy documents from DoD and related organizations, in order to determine an appropriate framework of objectives for energy decisions. We identify and explicitly define a comprehensive set of common objectives and note the language in each document that expresses the pursuit of each objective. This set of objectives and associated definitions clarifies relationships among the strategic documents, and is intended to help communication horizontally (e.g., across services) and vertically, across hierarchical levels. In addition, the objectives we define suggest possible metrics that may be measurable and comparable across services, and may be possible to aggregate across organizational levels.

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